Hacker's ramblings

To make sure my data is properly protected, I keep a habit of lifting off monthly backups from my NAS to an external drive. I have couple of Samsung Story USB-drives dedicated for that purpose. This worked nicely for many years until I hit the brick wall. My combined monthly backup didn't fit the capacity of 1,5 TiB. It sure would be nice to have a "shingled" 8 TiB drive for that kind of storage, but unfortunately they are not available yet. See article New “Shingled” Hard Drives Hold Terabytes For Pennies A Gig.

In case you don't know what a Samsung Story drive is, it looks like this:

What I did was to pop the hood of my Story-drive to see what it had eaten. Very simple setup indeed, I went to a nearby store and got replacement 3 TiB WD Green drives (WD30EZRX).

Here is how the process goes. First pop the hood:

Quirk warning! The aluminium hood is held in place by 4 pieces of T9 Torx screws. The quirk here is, that T9 is not a common size. If you go to an average store, you'll find them having the smallest size of T10 (which is too big for this). Even my Apple repair kit doesn't have a T9, it has T8 and T10 pieces. I've taken apart Nokia phones, and they tend to have weird Torx-sizes, that's why I also have a kit which has T 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. So, your biggest hurdle is to find a T9 somewhere.

When you have the aluminium cover removed, it'll look like this:

I included a blow-up of the warranty void -disclaimer sticker. I don't think Story drives have been manufactured for a while, so the warranty should be void anyway. Un-surprisingly, inside the box there is a Samsung 3,5" HD-drive, a HD154UI. Under the aluminium hood you will also find a plastic bracket. It just fills up the space making the actual drive fitting nicely and not moving. The bracket has a total of 8 plastic tabs holding it in place. I simply pushed one pair simultaneously from both sides, and I was able to lift the plastic holder up a bit. Then I just moved my fingers to the next pair and it moved more. The plastic thingie will look like this:

When the plastic bracket is gone, you can simply lift the drive upwards. It is held in place only by some rubber tabs, but the drive is essentially loose at this point:

Beware, that the S-ATA to USB -adapter (JMicron) is connected to the front-panel with a wire. That acts as a power on/off -switch for the entire thing. There are 4 wires in the connector, but I think only 2 of them are in use:

It is a pretty common connector and comes off easily by simply pulling it. The next thing is to remove the S-ATA / USB -converter -thingie from the drive. It is attached by a single #1 Phillips screw:

After the scew is gone, the entire converter-board will come loose from S-ATA -connector. Now that you have the hard drive almost completely stripped of all extra goodies, the last thing is to remove the rubber tabs and the kind-of-screws that hold them in place:

The rubber tabs or "pillows" come off by simply pulling them off from the sides. The metal "poles" are another story. They look like #1 Phillips, but the alloy they're made of is of poor quality. You can assume that a screwdriver isn't the primary tool here. I actually used pliers to turn them loose. Now everything is removed from the Samsung-drives, it's time to go big:

Just put the 4 metal screws back, fix the S-ATA / USB -converter board, attach the power-switch -cable, the rubber tabs and put the drive back to it's place. Like this:

After attaching the aluminium cover, it was a moment of truth. Does it still work? I plugged the power-cable and USB-cable back and went to my Linux:

kernel: usb 3-1.2: new high-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd
kernel: usb 3-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=04e8, idProduct=5f06
kernel: usb 3-1.2: Product: Samsung STORY Station
kernel: usb 3-1.2: Manufacturer: JMicron
kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
kernel: scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Samsung  STORY Station         PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
kernel: sd 9:0:0:0: [sde] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).

Looked really good! Checking to see what my new drive had out-of-the-box:

# parted /dev/sde print
Error: /dev/sde: unrecognised disk label
Model: Samsung STORY Station (scsi)
Disk /dev/sde: 3001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: unknown
Disk Flags:

It had nothing. Full of zeros. Not even a partition table. I'd launched the parted and went for GPT and a new Btrfs partition:

# parted /dev/sde
GNU Parted 3.1
Using /dev/sde
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) mkpart "Backups" ext2 17.4kB -1
Warning: You requested a partition from 16.9kB to 3001GB (sectors
33..5860531215).
The closest location we can manage is 17.4kB to 3001GB (sectors
34..5860531215).
Is this still acceptable to you?
Yes/No? yes
Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance.
Ignore/Cancel? i
(parted) quit
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.

Continuing with setup:

# ls -l /dev/sde*
brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 64 Dec  8 23:07 /dev/sde
brw-rw----. 1 root disk 8, 65 Dec  8 23:06 /dev/sde1

# mkfs.btrfs /dev/sde1
Btrfs v3.17
See http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org for more information.

Turning ON incompat feature 'extref': increased hardlink limit per file to 65536
fs created label (null) on /dev/sde1
        nodesize 16384 leafsize 16384 sectorsize 4096 size 2.73TiB

Looking perfect! The JMicron thingie could handle all of the new capacity, Linux saw the USB-converter nicely:

# mount /dev/sde1 /mnt/usb/
# df -k /mnt/usb/
Filesystem      1K-blocks  Used  Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sde1      2930265588 16896 2928139456   1% /mnt/usb

Cool! Really big numbers for capacity. Now I can manage with these couple years more.

Looks like somebody at Moldova was following The Fappening, and is getting bright ideas. I got an e-mail like this into one of my honeypot-addresses:

The fake e-mail goes like this:

Subject: Your apple id has been disabled      05/12/2014 09:44:30

Dear Customer;

We need to ask you to complete a short and brief step to securing and validating your account information.

https://appleid.apple.com

Failure to complete our validation process will result in a suspension of your Apple ID.

We take every step needed to automatically validate our users; unfortunately in your case we were unable to. The process only takes a couple of minutes and will make sure there is no interruption to your account.

I wasn't much surprised by that, becuse I don't use that account for anything serious (like Apple ID). I checked the link before clicking, obviously it wasn't to apple.com, but to a hijacked site located at Moldova. Somebody innocent was running an unpatched WordPress, and the crooks added some "bonus" content to the site. the HTML said: <meta name="generator" content="WordPress 3.5.1" />. The "apple ID" site looked pretty good (except, no HTTPS and that the address bar didn't match):

At the time of publishing this post, the victim-site has been pulled off the air, so there is no point in going there anymore.

Anyway, this is a yet another proof to be careful out there. In the Internet, most things aren't what they seem. 

Windows 10 Technical Preview has been out for two months now on Windows Insider Program. I installed it pretty much when it was released into a virtual machine and has been running a number of different software, that I'd use anyway on it.

The install process is pretty much the same than it has been since Windows 7. I created a virtual 20 GiB drive (which later turned out to be not enough) and chose to install on the non-initialized drive. No surprises there. This is what runs as out-of-box-experience:

It looks very much like Windows 8.1. Notice how the window border is quite thin. This is something Microsoft hasn't done in their operating systems ever before. Internet Explorer is still version 11 as in Windows 8.1 and the reported user-agent string is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.4; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko.

It sees the virtual CPU incorrectly as a Xeon, however the physical CPU is of Sandy Bridge microarchitecture:

Finally the start menu is something, that I would like to use. Microsoft had a decent start menu on Windows 7, they dropped it for Windows 8 and restored a crappy version for Windows 8.1. This time it works and the stupid full-screen-apps -mode is gone. The start menu will contain both the classic and tile-based apps at the same time:

This is what computer properties and disc management look like. Pretty much the same than in Windows 7:

Also control panel is unchanged:

The version is displayed as Windows NT 6.4, but apparently it is going to change and the version number will be 10. Also IPv6 works as expected:

I don't know what the idea with forcing automatic updates on, but luckily there is a way to change that. The GUI won't let you touch it, but a direct registry hack to change it: How to disable Automatic Updates in windows 10 Tech Preview. I changed the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update value AUOptions into 3 (Automatically download and notify of installation). This is a change for previous Windowses, which are using a different registry key. See Article ID 328010 - How to configure automatic updates by using Group Policy or registry settings about it. Anyway, this is how it looks like:

One other thing I also changed, was to speed up the preview image process. As a default, new installations are on a slow track, but I wanted to get the new versions a bit faster. This is a bit funny thing, the only way to change it is to go for a new-style full-screen settings (luckily this runs in a window). There doesn't seem to be a control panel -setting for this. For details see: How to Stay Up to Date and Get the Latest Windows 10 Technical Preview Builds. This is how I changed the setting:

To upgrade into a newer build (9860 in this case) it goes something like this. I found the process quite amusing:

When the slow process completes, the bottom right corner will state the new version:

During the testing I haven't had many issues, but here is one:

For some reason system interrupts started hogging lot of CPU-resources. That is something I've never seen on any Windows. After a nice reboot, the problem disappeared. That's what you get from running beta operating system. 

Also, my original 20 GiB of disc space ran out after couple of new build upgrades. This is what happened:

There wasn't much else to do, except to shut down the Windows 10 instance. Go to virtualization host (Linux) and add 10 GiB of space into the virtual drive:
qemu-img resize Windows\ 10.qcow2 +10G

As no Windows version is capable of actually expanding the partition and file system on a grown drive, I mounted an ISO-image of GParted and booted the virtual machine from that. It could expand the system partition in a couple of seconds (it is a really good partition manager software). After having 30 GiB of space, the latest build upgraded without problems.

My thanks goes to F-Secure. I've been running their new FS Protection (still on beta) on my Windows 10 and it works really well. 

I survived Slush 2014.

It takes a lot of energy, but is worth it. The event itself is quite an experiment. 5 stages full of talented people talking about their ideas and what they did wrong or right to deserve the right to be speaking to all of us. All the parties that are taking place, when the actual event is not will also consume a lot of energy.

Of all the events, speeches and pitches my personal picks are (I intentionally didn't include those, to whom I'm somehow affiliated with):

• Wooga's CEO Jens Begemann describing how they create hit games, aka. the hit-filter. This seems to be a working recipe from Supercell. The fact seems to be, that if there are 100.000 games in the App Store, only top-15 of them are making serious money. So, your game needs to be in top-15, not top-500.
  
• Dragonbox creator Jean-Baptiste Huynh telling how he wants to change the way kids are learning algebra with a completely new approach by playing a game. It seems that schooling everywhere in the world is sticking with 300 year old methods: to sit on your desk and in order to prepare yourself to work successfully by a conveyer belt of a factory, you must sit still and do as your teacher tells you to. Doesn't sound like 2010s to me. Huh!
  
• Kano founder Alex Klein wanting to turn kids into super-kids by freeing their thinking by introducing everybody into computers and programming. The apparent fact remains, that currently there exists over 8 billion computing devices in the world and only 50 million of us know how to program them (amateurs and professionals combined). His idea is to empower non-nerds to create nice things with computers too.
  

My thanks goes to Slush organizers, Tencent Games and Pocket Gamer.

For many many years I haven't waited the christmas that anxiously, that I would have an advent calendar. Not even a chocolate one. This year I chose to make an exception to that. I got a recommendation to get a proper one from Lieferello.de. Here it is:

This calendar contains 24 (as any advent calendar does) cans of beer. Nice! Finally a good reason to count days for the 1st of December.

If you want to order one, here is the direct link to Die Weihnachtsbrauerei Bier.

During a regular day I run a number of different computers. One day I wanted to take a copy of my Wall-E DVD and transfer it to iPad for later viewing. Since I sync that iPad to a particular Mac, I had to transfer the H.264 file of the movie there. As this was a one time thing and I happened to have a suitable USB-stick at my desk, I chose to go the old fashioned way. Copy the file to the stick and walk with the stick to the other machine. Except ... I couldn't copy the file to the USB stick. The stick was initialized with Mac OS X and contained a GUID partition table (or GPT). It completely refused to work with my Windows 7. What! Really?

The official word from Windows and GPT FAQ is:
Q: Can Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 read, write, and boot from GPT disks?
A: Yes, all versions can use GPT partitioned disks for data. Booting is only supported for 64-bit editions on UEFI-based systems.

Sorry, but I beg to differ. There seems to be some level of support, but ... not to the full extent. We're talking about Linux or OS X -level support here.

The stick looks like this during entire process:

# parted /dev/sde print
Model: JetFlash Transcend 8GB (scsi)
Disk /dev/sde: 8032MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                  Flags
 1      20.5kB  210MB   210MB   fat32        EFI System Partition  boot
 2      210MB   8031MB  7821MB  fat32        Video

And this is how my Mac saw the situation:

$ mount
/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/VIDEO (msdos, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)

This is what the Disk Manager of my Windows 7 said:

All looks good, except the OS failed to automatically assign a drive letter to the partition. No biggie, I can manually add one:

... except, I couldn't:

The error message of The system cannot find the file specified gave me an impression, that things aren't rolling my way.

At this point it wasn't about copying the file, but finding out what was going on. I had a Windows 8.1 right next to my Windows 7, so I plugged the USB into that one. This is what it saw:

But wait! There was something fishy about it. The drive capacity didn't match. To test it, I copied a file to the drive:

Running Services After the Network is up

Something funny happened to my Fedora 20 installation. Stuff that used to work stopped doing so. I understand, that I'm dealing with "bleeding edge" Linux-distro, but it kind of starts to annoy me, when things don't get back like they were.

Here is one:

# systemctl status iscsi.service --all
iscsi.service - Login and scanning of iSCSI devices
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/iscsi.service; enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)
           start condition failed at Thu 2014-07-17 12:23:18 EEST; 1min 24s ago
           none of the trigger conditions were met
     Docs: man:iscsid(8)
           man:iscsiadm(8)

Jul 17 12:23:17 box systemd[1]: Started Login and scanning of iSCSI devices.
Jul 17 12:23:18 box systemd[1]: Started Login and scanning of iSCSI devices.

Aow come on! "none of the trigger conditions were met"!! I don't know what changed with the precious trigger conditions. Basic checks didn't reveal anything noteworthy:

# systemctl is-active iscsi.service
active
# systemctl list-dependencies iscsi.service
iscsi.service

There are some other people suffering from the same issue. Fedora 20 ypbind won’t start at boot. NIS logins unavailable immediately after boot (ypbind service NOT started). and Bug 1027114 - nfs mount fails during boot because network is not ready point me to the direction of service trying to start too early. There is a document explaining how to run services only after network is up (Running Services After the Network is up), but the point is: somebody goofed! This used to work.

I tried a classic off/on -trick:

# systemctl disable iscsi.service
# systemctl enable iscsi.service

... no avail. Still after a boot I have a list of failing services:

# systemctl --failed
UNIT             LOAD   ACTIVE SUB    DESCRIPTION
arpwatch.service loaded failed failed Arpwatch daemon which keeps track of ether
dhcpd.service    loaded failed failed DHCPv4 Server Daemon
iscsi.service    loaded failed failed Login and scanning of iSCSI devices

LOAD   = Reflects whether the unit definition was properly loaded.
ACTIVE = The high-level unit activation state, i.e. generalization of SUB.
SUB    = The low-level unit activation state, values depend on unit type.

3 loaded units listed. Pass --all to see loaded but inactive units, too.
To show all installed unit files use 'systemctl list-unit-files'.

Finally I chose to add the After=network-online.target -line to my service description. First the service description needs to be copied from /usr/lib/systemd/system/ into /etc/systemd/system/. The rule is very simple: don't edit files under /usr/ and it applies also here. Systemd has a built in fall-back mechanism. If your own tailor made file doesn't exist in /etc/, it will take the default one. It is good to have that, but better if no such tinkering wasn't needed at all. What if there is an update to the service-description? I have to manually update my copied file.

So, I did a:

# cd /etc/systemd/system/
# cp /usr/lib/systemd/system/iscsi.service .

and edited the file. I added one line to Unit-description:

[Unit]
After=network-online.target

To be absolutely clear: I didn't touch the other lines.

Since systemd doesn't pick up the changes very easily, I did a:

# systemctl disable iscsi.service
# systemctl enable iscsi.service

after status informed, that my change was in place:

# systemctl status iscsi
iscsi.service - Login and scanning of iSCSI devices
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/iscsi.service; enabled)

Notice how, the service description is now under /etc/.

Anyway, that did the trick for all of my failing services. Now they start nicely on bootup.

My iPhone 4S spent a while in the bottom of the lake. It worked under water and I got it out dried it, and it seems to work. Apparently something is short-circuiting as it doesn't stay turned off for more than a second. Mostly it does work, but I wanted a new one and went for a iPhone 6. It is impossible to get one without queueing for weeks. So, I put my order to Apple's on-line store and waited the weeks and then TNT-guy dropped the thing at my door. Nice! New toys!

It looks like this in a box:

The phone is wrapped into plastic and there is the Apple-tab at the end:

In the box there are also charger, Lightning USB-cable and ear-plugs/headphones (I don't much like them):

The first idea that comes to my mind, is that "darn it's light!". Because the phone is much lighter than 4S. It is much bigger phone, but still so light. Nice! Here's the comparison:

One thing I had to do was to drive to my telco's store and get my SIM-card changed. 4S eats micro-SIMs, but this one wants a nano-SIM. Darn! There is the traditional Apple SIM-slot in the side:

Finally I got the first smoke out of it:

I chose to go for iTunes, but it didn't like me:

Crap! That's really not encouraging to see that kind of message. My solution was to un-plug it and try again. It worked! I got to the point where it was possible to set up the phone from my previous backup:

Yet another cold shower. It really paid off to upgrade into iOS 8.1! NOT!

The solution was to set the phone as a new and do an upgrade:

After iOS 8.1 was running, I did a full reset to the phone and tried the iTunes restore-thing again. This time everything was ok. The restore ran much faster then on 4S. I have over 10 gigs of stuff to restore. Finally:

Nice! The screen is much bigger, and restore did place my icons to their original locations. That sure looks funny on a much bigger screen!

Now that the phone was running, it was time to look some bonus things. I got a Vaja case for it:

That should protect the very expensive phone (unless dropped into a lake).

Plugging cords is not nice at office environment, so I normally sync and charge my stuff with a lighting-dock. It was visible in couple of earlier pics, but here are more:

My choice is Macally charge & sync dock Designed for Lightning iDevices and it works nicely on my iPad too:

They don't sell those in Europe for reason unknown to me. I guess it has something to do with electricity. As I ordered mine from US, it has an US transformer in it. Luckily a dock doesn't need electricity for anything, and charging fully works from my PC.

Ok, enough accessories, back to iPhone 6. It's a darn good one. It has to be the best iPhone so far! It does well on Carat battery statistics, they don't actually give out the results, but it was the best of iPhones in that. There are some results in Finnish newspaper article. On top of that, the screen (altough it is too big) is really good, camera is good and the thing runs apps very fast. I totally recommend gettin one!

One of these days, I went to see if my motherboard has a newer BIOS. It had, and since I had not upgraded the BIOS after building my PC, I chose to go for upgrade.

This is one of the newer model PCs. You download the file, put it into a FAT-32 formatted USB-stick. Reboot the computer and enter UEFI-setup screens. One of them has an option to display the contents of the USB-stick and load the file, upgrade the BIOS and ... reset the settings and reboot. Wait a minute! Did I just say reset the settings. Yes.

Guess what happened to my Intel Rapid Storage Technology RAID-1 -setup.

Crapper! I didn't see that one coming. Now I remember again why I typically don't use motherboard "fake" RAIDs. Also, by the looks of it I wasn't alone with this: RAID1 changed to AHCI after BIOS update. Also, somebody with a Dell computer was experiencing something similar in the Intel's own discussion boards: Raid 1 rebuild with Rapid Storage Technology. I checked the manuals Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) User guides, but didn't see anything that would help. Self-help seems always to be the best option anyway.

I turned the S-ATA mode back to RAID:

... but trying to re-create the RAID-1 volume seemed a bit dangerous:

The part where it says "Warning: All data on selected disks will be lost" kind of gets my attention. I didn't want to go that way.

Booting to Windows worked. Looks like drive(s) don't have any headers and if necessary, can act as a single drive:

Naturally when Windows sees two drives instead of one, it means that there is no RAID. To get this one fixed I started Interl Rapid Storage Technology user interface. It has the option to create RAID volume on RAID-ready drives:

More importantly, it has the possibility of not erasing data on a single disc:

When accepted, the rebuild process starts. It will migrate data for hours:

When it finishes, there will be only one drive left:

As the end result, the BIOS was upgraded, RAID-1 was rebuilt and I was happy again. All it took was 6 hours of rebuild time and a lot of stress!

The original post about curcfg_tool.

So I decided to add couple of new features to my tool. However, neither of of them work.

Asiantuntijakaveri-blog introduced hack to run commands on boot: Persistent customizations to Huawei B593u with stock firmware. I added a feature to do that:

./curcfg_tool -rc "update-westerneurope.huaweidevice.com ; /upgflash/init.d/rc.local" -w

The flaw is in the httpupg-command startup. It takes the server address from curcfg.xml, but it doesn't escape it properly. This makes it possible to piggy-back any command on it. The thing is, that in my B593, the automatic firmware upgrade does not run automatically. I can go trigger it manually. At that point it runs my script I created at /upgflash/init.d/rc.local. My hope was, that system would run it automatically on bootup, but it doesn't.

Another thing I added was NTP-server change. I don't know where the list comes from, in my case it is completely ridiculous. However, the source for information is not from curcfg.xml. For example:

./curcfg_tool -ntp1 ntp.dnainternet.fi -ntp2 fi.pool.ntp.org -w

... doesn't change anything. The new servers don't appear at the list in GUI, nor the system doesn't update time from them.

Crap! Both attempts failed miserably. Please drop me a comment if you have anything to add to those ones. 

Latest OS X version Yosemite or 10 is out. Funny thing, the operating system 10 has a version 10 released.

The thing is ... it's free, but it's big. The amount of downloading needed is easily 5+ GiB. When I downloaded mine, it said 6 hours of load time. On my 250 Mbit/s fiber! Argh. It downloaded a hour or so and choked completely. Argh, argh! When I resumed, it picked a better server and I got rest of the file in 10 minutes or so. Anyway, I absolutely, positively don't want to do that on all of my Macs. So, let's figure out something smarter on that.

The sources of my information are:

• How to Burn OS X Yosemite to a USB Flash Drive
• DISKUTIL(8) - BSD System Manager's Manual
• Disk Management From the Command-Line, Part 2
• Starting from an external USB storage device (Intel-based Macs)
  

Step 0: Prerequisites

USB-booting a Mac is trickier than a PC. The knowledge base article HT1948 states:
Intel-based Macs support starting from an external USB storage device's volume that:

• Has been formatted with a GUID partition type
• Contains an installation of Mac OS X 10.4.5 or later, or Mac OS X 10.5 or later, which is compatible with (or shipped with) the Mac that the USB device is connected to. Note: You should not use a version of Mac OS X that is earlier ("older") than the version your Mac shipped with.

So, if you just bought an USB-stick, the chances are, that it is MBR-partitioned FAT32. That's my experience of getting new ones. They are incompatible at their current state for USB-booting a Mac. Not to worry, that can be fixed!

Step 1: Go download

In your Apple menu (the top left apple-shaped thing at every program's menu), go for Software Update. Yosemite should be there as a free download from App Store. Select it and wait ... wait forever!

In the classic Commodore 64 game Impossible Mission the phrase was "Another visitor! Stay a while; stay forever!". [Actually the mission was possible. As the game was pretty good, I completed it a number of times.]

Step 2: Go USB

Now that you have the thing in your drive, don't proceed with the upgrade.

When you reach this screen:

do not proceed! You can actually quit the installer, it won't delete the files from your drive.

Take at least a 8 GiB USB-storage. 4 won't do it, but any larger will. In my case, the USB-stick appeared as /dev/disk3. That may vary on your system. Also it is possible to use some GUI-tools on OS X to format your drives, but as a Linux-nerd I don't know about them.

To make sure, the stick is in a Mac-format (this needs to be run as root, that's what the sudo is for). This will partition and format the entire stick into Mac-use:

# sudo /bin/bash
root# diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk3 1 GPT jhfs+ "OS X Yosemite" 0b

It will say something like this as a result:

Started partitioning on disk3
Unmounting disk
Creating the partition map
Waiting for the disks to reappear
Formatting disk3s2 as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with name OS X Yosemite
Initialized /dev/rdisk3s2 as a 7 GB case-insensitive HFS Plus volume with a 8192k journal
Mounting disk
Finished partitioning on disk3
/dev/disk3
   #:                   TYPE NAME               SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:  GUID_partition_scheme                   *8.0 GB     disk3
   1:                    EFI EFI                209.7 MB   disk3s1
   2:              Apple_HFS OS X Yosemite      7.7 GB     disk3s2

Next thing is to confirm, that the volume with given name will be mounted:

root# ls -l /Volumes/
total 40
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin     1 Oct 17 13:27 Macintosh HD -> /
drwxrwxr-x  7 root  wheel   306 Oct 18 13:12 OS X Yosemite

If it does, you're ready to go. Copy the thing into it:

root# cd "/Applications/Install OS X Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources"
root# ./createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/OS\ X\ Yosemite/ \
  --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app \
  --nointeraction

It will result in a lengthy process saying:

Erasing Disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 30%...100%...
Copying installer files to disk...
Copy complete.
Making disk bootable...
Copying boot files...
Copy complete.
Done.

Step 3: Go update

Your stick is ready. This is the part you will be replicating to any of your Macs you want to upgrade.

Reboot the Mac and make sure to boot from the USB. This can be achieved by pressing down option-key during boot:

The official Apple instruction at knowlegebase article HT1948 states:
To start from a USB storage device that meets the above requirements:

1. connect the device
2. restart
3. immediately press and hold the Option key to access Startup Manager
   

If you successfully followed the steps, you will end up in Mac boot manager:

In that, you pretty much select the drive you want to boot from. In this particular case, making a choice for the recently prepared USB-stick will be a good one. The network selection is there to confuse you. Ignore it and double click the USB-drive.

Most steps in this upgrade will include lot of waiting. Make sure that you have reserved couple of hours for the upgrade. Screens like this will become familiar to you:

Most time estimates are wild guesses. A 9 minute wait in reality is something like 45 minutes. Eventually the USB-stick finishes booting, and you will end up in a screen saying "To set up the installation of OS X, click Continue". Most screens will refer your upgrade as an install. It is nerve-wrecking thing, because you don't know if it is going to wipe your settings and data, or do a nice upgrade what you'd be expecting. My experience is, that it will upgrade nicely, but it won't say it properly.

Then there is a license screen which you must agree to continue. Then land on OS X Utilities. One thing you can do with a bootable stick is to install/upgrade an OS X:

When you select to go for install/upgrade, yet another license screen appears. Select the install/upgrade destination as the Macintosh HD (typical installations have that). First the installer/upgrader will prepare and then do an install:

This is the most time-consuming part. A cup of coffee doesn't do it. You can easily cook and eat a meal with the coffee during this. My hardware isn't especially old or slow, but ... the upgrade is.

After a reboot, you will end up in the OOBE (or out-of-box experience). This will start with Apple ID login. Apple makes an effort to not allow stolen hardware to be used and they pretty much require you to login during install:

Since I have a 2-factor authentication enabled for my Apple ID, a 2FA-screen will appear during the process:

There are steps about sending your usage data to Apple, then yet another license screen:

Then you need to make the choice of upgrading iCloud into iCloud Drive, the new thing that came with iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite:

Then you're pretty much done. Finally your upgrade is ready!

Step 4: Done!

Login for the first time:

One of the first things I did, was eject my USB-stick (there were couple other Macs to be updated, too):

At this point, you can continue using your precious Mac.

Aftermath

Was it worth it? Not really, the change is mainly cosmetic. iCloud Drive isn't a reason for me to upgrade. Apple-menu doesn't have System Update anymore, they changed it into App Store. That's like running iOS.

I updated anyway, as a nerd I like the latest stuff running on my computers. I should yield less problems and there needs to be some progress. I find myself stating the same thing in couple of my blog posts, "it wasn't worth it, but I did it anyway". With computers, it never will result any good to stand still and ignore future.

When I first saw an ad popping from my Windows 7 system tray I was pretty convinced, that my computer had been hijacked, keylogger installed, all my files sent to a Chinese server and police knocking down my door, because my machine is serving cp-pics in a torrent network. Then I realized, that the advertisement is about Nero. A software, that I bought and installed voluntarily. See:

As you can see from the dates on the pictures, that I've been waiting for this to happen again. This time I was ready and could confirm, that the culprit was indeed Nero. It is totally unclear to me, if I agreed to this in end user license agreement, but that's what they are doing. Perhaps I also gave the birth rights of my first born son like F-Secure did in London (see: Londoners give up eldest children in public Wi-Fi security horror show). Anyway, I'm not exactly happy, that they choose to do this. Nobody knows what else are they doing.

By googling, I found out, that I'm no alone with this problem. Nero's own discussion forum has a thread with topic Why do you think it's acceptable to spam people's PCs?, and there is actually removal instructions.

First go to Task Scheduler:

There is an own folder for Nero and in it, there is a NeroInfo running at install time every 2 days. It most certainly does not display ads every time it runs, but there is the master of this botnet somewhere giving instructions on when to run and what to display. Just delete the task:

And finish it off by deleting the files also:

Now it should stay off for a while! This is a fine specimen of paid software screwing you to the ass.

I updated all Parallels Plesk Panel PHP-versions to latest. Included in my yum-repo, there is a PHP 5.6.0 version with fully working PHP-FPM.

If something doesn't work in PHP 5.6, please drop me a comment. 

Being an old geezer, I typically upgrade my iPhone firmware via USB-cable. Wireless users need to wait for the upgrade to happen, USB-people simply plug the cable and go. Also it is a very robust method and less things will go wrong than doing it wireless. Yeah, right!

So I plugged my phone in. Made sure, that I had latest iTunes version running and that a recent backup was made. Then, DÄNG!

Yeah. Crap! The iPhone could not be updated. An unknown error occurred. Really? Is it possible to be more vague? Next to frustration, the next thought that goes through my mind is: "Did I brick it!!! Is it still salvageable?".

Quite soon I had a positive signal:

Phew! iTunes announced, that the device is in recovery mode. Somewhere before it actually started the process, there was a question "Do you want to upgrade software and restore backup?" In reality it was a non-question, pretty much the only choice was "Ok". Looks like I didn't manage to get a screenshot of that.

The actual recovery process took a very long time. At the time I didn't realize, that it wasn't a "recovery" by definition. It was a simple iOS install. The next iTunes said was:

I'm not sure if this is part of the iOS 8 kill-switch -procedure or is that a regular thing to gain Internet access via 3G, but the installation refused to continue before I had successfully entered the PIN-code for my SIM-card. Then iTunes was ready to start restoring my precious data to the device:

At Apple there is a known reality distortion field, making a nice guestimate of 3 minutes for the restore time. After 15 minutes, the best guestimate was less than 1 minute. Nevertheless, I really had nothing else to but to wait for the restore to complete. Finally it said:

Oh yes!! I didn't brick it after all. I simply took the long route to the end.

It really wasn't worth the update. The only really noticeable thing is the voice button in messaging and the fact, that it drains my battery much faster than my previous iOS 7 did. But who would have guessed that would happen, or ... iOS 7.1 makes everything faster — including your battery drain @ 9to5mac.com. So, does that really happen every time they release an upgraded iOS-version?

As I have promised a number of times to number of people. Here it finally is! The first version of my tool to alter your B593 configuration. With this tool you can change admin passwords for web GUI and SSH to something of your liking. It does not (yet) convert plaintext passwords into encrypted ones, but it successfully writes the changes to flash, thus making them permanent.

Prerequisites

• Huawei B593 u-12
• Access to your box for running commands, telnet/SSH are really good options for this
• While at Busybox sh prompt, internet connectivity via the mobile interface (4G/3G/2G)
  

Getting the tool

The MIPS32 binary version suitable for running at your B593 is at http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/Huawei%20B593/curcfg/latest. The C source code is also available at: http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/Huawei%20B593/curcfg/

1. Log into your box
2. (recommended) Change into directory /upgflash/
3. Download the binary into your box:
   wget -g -v -l curcfg_tool -r "/Huawei%20B593/curcfg/latest" opensource.hqcodeshop.com
   
• As you can see, Busybox has a mighty quirky wget!
• Anyway, that command will download the tool from the above URL and place it to the current directory with local name curcfg_tool.
• Also note, that your box must have a functioning Internet access for download. The only other viable option is via FTP-hack. The environment is very limited and file transfers are restricted heavily.
  
4. Make sure, that the file is executable:
   chmod a+x curcfg_tool
   

Running the tool

Now that you have the thing sitting there, run it:

# ./curcfg_tool
Usage:
-V                     - Print version information
-cw <base64 encoded web gui password>  - set password
-cs <base64 encoded SSH password>      - set password
-w                     - write changes to flash (default: don't write)
-fi <file name>        - input file (default: read from flash)
-fo <file name>        - write changes (default: /tmp/flashinfo.bin)

An example of resetting the web-GUI password would be:

# ./curcfg_tool -cw f5338SA1kb4= -w
Read data: addr = 0xe00000, len = 0x4 ...
Begin write to file
Export done
Reading 25785 bytes of config
Read data: addr = 0xe00000, len = 0x64bd ...
Begin write to file
Export done
Writing 25785 bytes of config
/tmp/flashinfo.bin size = 25790 Bytes
Read file done
Begin write to flash
Load file done

The magicical Base64 encoded 3-DES encrypted string f5338SA1kb4= is "admin" in plain text. After a reboot (just say reboot at prompt), you can login into your web-GUI and change the password into something of your liking.

What next?

That's pretty much it as of now. If you don't like your operator designated passwords, you can change them.

How do I ...

• ... see what my current password is:
  You cannot. Encryption key is not known for pre-SP100 firmware and SP100+ firmware is using double encryption with 3-DES and AES and entire flow of information is not yet known.
• ... access the prompt of my box:
  See B593_exploit.pl for details.
  
• ... access the prompt of my box, but I have SP100+ firmware and don't know any of my passwords:
  You cannot. Yet. Currently known exploits have been fixed preventing access.
  However, in this case the real question seems to be: "How did you get your box running in the first place?"
  
• ... run the B593_exploit.pl -tool, my Perl isn't working:
  You may want to install all CPAN-modules the script requires. Also skip the Windows and use a proper computer.